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An intensely concentrated aroma of marmalade with hints of apricot and complexity from well-integrated French oak. Rich fruit and honey characters provide a lingering finish, balanced by firm acidity. A true Sauternes-style Smillon with a distinctive New Zealand signature.
Release Date: 4 February 2002
Regions: 100% Hawke's Bay
Varieties: 100% Smillon
This sweet wine is a true French Sauternes-style Noble Smillon with a distinctive New Zealand signature. Rich and intensely concentrated, it has been crafted from fully botrytised berries from our Korokipo Estate Vineyard.
Colour: Rich yellow-gold of fully botrytised dessert wine
Aromas: Intensely concentrated bouquet of marmalade, honey and apricots.
Palate: Rich fruit and honey characters provide a lingering finish, balanced by firm acidity and well-integrated French oak.Food matching suggestions
The rich fruit and honey characters in this Sauternes-style Smillon enhance rich creamy desserts and blue cheese.
Church Road's mouth-watering Rhubarb, Chardonnay & Polenta Cake with Cardamom Anglaise teams perfectly with this wine too.
To add flair to creamy-style desserts whisk a little Church Road Reserve Noble Smillon into the fresh cream or custard accompanying them. If you are serving a cheese board, marinate a selection of dried fruit with a little Church Road Reserve Noble Smillon overnight and wow your guests with the rich, honeyed fruit.
Recommended cellaring
This delicious Noble Smillon is ready to drink now, but will reward careful cellaring for seven or more years from vintage.
Winemaking
Winemakers: Tony Prichard, Peter Hurlstone
Fermentation notes: Hand-pressed in a small oak basket press, the resulting juice was cold-settled and racked before fermentation in new French oak barriques. Fermentation was halted once the desired alcohol/sugar balance was achieved.
Maturation notes: Aged in 100% new French oak barriques for approximately 19 months.
The key to this wine lies in the strict observance of traditional French Sauternes vineyard practices and winemaking techniques. These consist of individual berry selection, hand-pressing in a small basket press and full barrel fermentation in new French oak, to optimise concentration, power, balance and complexity in the wine.
Vintage
The very shy-bearing Smillon crop was hand-harvested in late May to mid-June 1997 in five separate passes.
Analysis
Alcohol: 13.5% by volume
Total acidity: 9.2 g/l as tartaric
Brix at harvest: 31 - 37 Brix
**** If there's heaven in a bottle, this comes close ... It's deep gold, aromatic with honey, apricots, nuts, citrus, intensely flavoured, complex with hints of rich caramel, fruit and toasty oak beautifully melded, but a clean lingering aftertaste.
Charmian Smith, Otago Daily Times
... mature and interesting with a strong apricot and marmalade bouquet, apricot and caramel flavours, and a touch of austere almond on the finish.
Graeme Barrow - Northern Advocate
**** Wine of the Week ... Not as unctuously sweet as some New Zealand dessert wines (and all the better for it), this intensely flavoured, beautifully textured dessert wine makes a perfect match for poached pears and/or blue cheese.
Evening Post
This was really worth waiting for. It's a brilliant wine with rich gold colours and lovely aromas of honey and raisins and apricots. It's luscious to the taste, those aromas repeat on the palate and the flavours are rich and long lasting. This wine is in the true style of sauternes, only richer and better balanced and longer lasting.
Peter Shaw - Waikato Times
